To reduce the potential for errors in drug infusion, current advanced infusion pumps store a drug library that sets soft and hard limits for the range of the infusion parameters, such as infusion rate, bolus, and total bolus. The health care professional (HCP), e.g., doctor, nurse, or pharmacist, can override the soft limit, but not the hard limit. The drug infusion history is recorded by the pump to be retrieved for post-surveillance or accounting purposes.
There are several problems with the current system. One problem is that the drug library is stored in the pump without the benefit of patient data. The limits of the parameters must be wide enough to account for the variation among individual patients within the population. However, these limits in some cases may still be too wide to prevent unsafe dosing for an individual patient. Another problem is that the same drug can have different concentrations and limits depending on the hospital environment (e.g., NICU, PICU, ICU, OR, etc). The HCP must manually select the correct entry from the drug library and a wrong selection can result in the wrong concentration, infusion mode, or limits thus resulting in delivery errors. Currently available pumps cannot effectively check drug delivery information against patient identification information. This allows the possibility of errors such as the wrong drug being infused to the wrong patient and patient weight information being wrongly entered manually, which can result in an incorrect infusion rate for body weight mode infusion. Maintenance of drug libraries throughout an institution's pump inventory is another problem. The drug library stored in the pump must be electronically updated (manually or wirelessly) and the task is more difficult when pumps are distributed across multiple locations within the institution. Finally, current methods for capturing actual drug infusion history are not very convenient for the purpose of surveillance or accounting. Manual downloading of infusion history from the pump is labor-intensive. The use of wireless networking to transmit infusion history records is another method; however, the wireless network at a hospital can be unreliable, and troubleshooting often requires technical expertise not available to the HCP using the pump.
Therefore, there is a need for a system that safely and conveniently delivers drugs using infusion pumps to patients, and it is to this apparatus the present invention is primarily directed.